WE'VE ARRIVED!

Hello friends! Thanks so much for reading our blog and keeping up on our trip to Ocean Springs, MS! Even though we have only been gone 3 days, I feel like a lot has happened. Let's see if I can give you a good summary of everything we have seen and experienced.

We started packing up our three 15 passenger vans and our trailer on Friday night at 6 pm. After just an hour, we were ready to load up our group of 24 students and 8 adults and leave for our first stop - Baton Rouge, Lousiana. Spending 26 1/2 hours straight in the vans convinced us that we are EXTREMELY slow travelors (apparently it was only supposed to be a 19 hour trip)!

The Christian Student Center at Lousiana State in Baton Rouge providing housing for all of us and we picked up Matt at the airport there to bring our trip total up to 33 people. We split up into 5 different groups and stayed in the Student Center and in staff and students' houses. Thanks so much LSU Christian Student Center for your great hospitality!

On Sunday morning we woke up early to meet at the 8:15 am South Baton Rouge Church of Christ worship service. We experience something that was a first for many people - a non-instrumental church service, which apparently is more common in the South. We also heard a great message about loving and serving others, which I thought was a perfect start to our week!

Sunday was a full, fun day as we headed from Baton Rouge in the direction of New Orleans. First we stopped at Evergreen Plantation (www.evergreenplantation.com) in Edgard, LA for a plantation tour and then we headed on to LaPlace, LA for a swamp tour with Cajun Pride Tours (www.cajunpridetours.com). The swamp tour was a big hit and our tour guide was completely crazy - sticking his feet in the water as the alligators swam by, dropping food into their mouths, and telling lots of great stories about the swamp and all the friendly (and not-so-friendly) creatures that live there. We also all got to hold a baby alligator, and luckily no one got pushed into the water or got bit (even though there were a couple of close calls!).

Finally, we drove into New Orleans and had supper in the French Quarter at Acme Oyster House. We tried lots of good southern cooking like jambalaya, gumpo, and boiled crawfish. We finished out our time in New Orleans by visiting the legendary Cafe du Monde for their world-famous Beignets - a small, square donut covered in powdered sugar. They were a big hit with our group and we were glad we spent the extra time trying to find them (we almost gave up but Brad's persistance paid off!).

We arrived at St. Paul's Methodist Church CORE tent city in Ocean Springs, Mississippi at 10:30 pm last night and met up with 3 more students for a grand total of 36 people. We had a short orientation this morning and then broke into 5 work groups and spent the day at various work sites drywalling, sanding, mudding, roofing, cleaning, and sanitizing (check the blog tomorrow for more details about our work and stories about the people we are working with).

We are off to a good start and looking forward to a great week of working and helping. We're just excited to be used in any way we can to bless everyone we have the blessing of coming into contact with! Please keep us in your prayers and keep checking the blog for regular updates (there is wireless internet here at the church, so I should be able to put up new posts pretty regularily this week). Have a great night!

(posted by Rebecca at 7:37 pm on 3/13/06)